


In that dark womb

by Naraht



Series: In that dark womb [1]
Category: Return to Night - Mary Renault
Genre: 1940s, Abortion, F/M, Pregnancy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-03
Updated: 2014-05-03
Packaged: 2018-01-21 18:47:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,084
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1560389
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Naraht/pseuds/Naraht
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Julian has survived the war. Hilary is pregnant. This may not be a happy ending.</p>
            </blockquote>





	In that dark womb

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Lilliburlero](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lilliburlero/gifts).



> This is very much a "bloweth-where-it-listeth" story and perhaps one that takes the characters on a bit of a journey from canon. I hope that you find it interesting nonetheless.

She was forty-one years old - the age that her mother had been when expecting her. It was five weeks since she had seen Julian. Her life seemed to have narrowed down to these two facts alone.

Julian's embarkation leave had been a cruel ten days in August, the inexorable logic of the RAF posting him to India mere days after peace had been declared in the Far East. The gaiety of VE Day had already evaporated when Hilary came up to London on a crowded and dirty Great Western train that spent over two hours motionless on a siding near Swindon. All the relief she could feel was a dissipation of tension, closer to exhaustion than anything else; all she wanted was to see Julian again and yet there was nothing that she dreaded more. He had written to say that he had taken a room at Dukes in St. James's. 

"I'm sorry I couldn't find anything better," he said, getting to his feet as she came wearily into the room. "Every hotel in London is still jammed full of American officers. I made reservations for dinner. And then I thought we could walk out and see the lights in Piccadilly."

Hilary could not bear the thought of it. "Julian, my dear," she said. "Just kiss me."

A few minutes later she realised she had forgot her Dutch cap back in Gloucestershire.

"We don't need it, do we?" Julian murmured intently, half pressing her into the mattress with his eagerness.

"There are always condoms," said Hilary, breathless and dimly aware of the fact that she had her legs wrapped around Julian's waist already. "But there won't be a chemist in London that's open at this hour, and we..."

"Let's not worry. It can't matter. After all the war is over now."

From a medical point of view the conclusion was dubious but Hilary said nothing. To have protested would have savoured of conceit. At her advanced age, she told herself, the chances of conception must be a hundred to one against. Insisting upon guarding against it seemed a pointless gesture towards a youth which she had knowingly allowed to slip through her fingers.

Afterwards Julian said: "It hardly seemed possible before."

"Mmm?" 

For a moment she thought that he meant his stillborn acting career, of which they had not spoken a word in years. She reached out to stroke his head, idly noting a single strand of silver which she had never noticed before. Julian responded instinctively to her touch, nestling closer, his cheek fitting against the curve of her neck. 

_He hasn't changed at all_ , she thought, in a sort of wonder half mixed with revulsion.

"One hardly expected to - to pull through," he said, so quietly that at first she hardly marked the import of his words. "It still seems unbelievable. Don't you think? I never expected to be lying with you like this, at the end of the war. I only thought that I would end up like my - like Richard Fleming, a picture on a mantelpiece for some poor mite to gaze at. And you..."

 _And you would end up just like my mother_ , thought Hilary. Perhaps that was not what he had meant. But she suspected it was.

"But Julian, darling," she said, "it's not possible now. Really it isn't."

"Well, it's all in the hands of fate anyway," said Julian happily.

***

A little more than a month later Hilary knew beyond doubt that fate - or Julian's whim - had played a cruel joke on her.

One first night of recklessness perhaps would have been defensible; after six years of marriage, it was less so. In retrospect Hilary wondered why on earth she had not said something. It was not that she had been swept away. Over the years she had become practiced at channeling and directing Julian's ardour; he would have stopped if she had asked. In the end, rationally, she could blame him for nothing.

Of course she blamed him nonetheless.

Her own carelessness made her feel sick. She was left aghast at her failure to recognise that even a hundred to one chance becomes reality one time in a hundred. She knew the risks only too well: to herself, to the child. The thought of telling Julian made her feel equally sick. He was a man, he would not have considered the consequences. Her medical practice, her carefully ordered life. Her marriage of six years' standing, during which she and Julian had never spent more than a month living under the same roof. 

She had already wondered whether their relationship might not survive the peace. An inevitable end, this she could accept, and a child might only hasten this - but a child would have a permanence and make demands much greater than those that Julian, for all his neediness, could ever have made.

Every consideration brought her back to the same conclusion... no, it was impossible. It could not be borne.

One evening, with the door of her sitting room firmly locked, Hilary took down her copy of the Medical Register and looked up a Harley Street address which was already emblazoned upon her memory. 

***

When she went up to town later that week she found the clinic just as she had imagined, an elegant Georgian building which was a far cry from her small, unassuming surgery in a Gloucestershire market town. She felt a stab of envy as she made her way up the steps to the glossily painted door. She could see her face reflected in the freshly-polished brass nameplate, but the name, though familiar, was not her own. 

She spent a few minutes in the waiting room, gazing blankly at a copy of _Tatler_. Another few minutes in the consulting room before the doctor entered, still reading his notes from the previous case. He looked up finally; he stared at her.

"Hilary Fleming," said David.

"Yes," said Hilary simply. "I didn't think of coming to anyone else."

She found herself shocked by how much he had aged. In her memory he was still the young, ambitious house surgeon of a decade ago, no older than Julian was now, but the man standing in front of her had hair shot with silver. He was the image of a Harley Street specialist: the suit he wore was impeccably cut, obviously bespoke; his watch was gold, as were the reading glasses which he now took off to examine her face more closely. With the glasses removed, she could see the fine lines around his eyes.

"Well," he said. Putting the notes aside on the examining table, he took a seat, his hands open on his knees. "I suppose you had better tell me what I can do for you."

Hilary had been rehearsing this moment for the whole of the train journey. Her heart had been - and was now - hammering so hard that she had wondered whether she might not miscarry without any medical intervention. But she would say her piece.

"I'm five weeks pregnant," she said. "As near as I can calculate. I want - I want a referral. I imagine that you must know someone good. If I can't have an experienced doctor, and a curettage, I won't go through with it."

David took a slow, thoughtful breath. "You're married," he said.

"Yes." 

She could hardly deny it; she had given her married name and there was the wedding ring on her finger. There was one on David's too; she had not noticed it before.

"He's overseas with the RAF," she added.

David raised a very familiar eyebrow at her.

"Embarkation leave," she said. "Just over a month ago."

"Ah. Of course." He paused, steepling his fingers. "Once upon a time you told me that you didn't believe in this sort of thing."

It was not a _non sequitur_. Hilary could remember the argument as if it were yesterday, stretching across several days and, at one point, into her bed. She had maintained that the purpose of a doctor was to save life, not to destroy it, not unconscious of the fact that some might expect a woman doctor to have reason to argue otherwise. David had made a forceful case for the opposition. After that he had made love to her with equal vehemence, as if he sought to prove his argument on her own body. It had been, simultaneously, both appalling and some of the best sex they had ever had.

If it had not been for the sex, she wondered whether she would have remembered the argument.

"It was quite a while ago," said Hilary.

He nodded thoughtfully. For the first time she wondered how much changed she must seem to him, worn by the years of the war and by more recent worry.

"I'll perform it myself," he said finally, "if you're willing."

The shock must have been evident on her face, for he immediately added:

"I'm not inexperienced, as it happens. A little sideline of mine. You would be surprised at the demand."

She recalled that at one point, a few years ago now, she had heard the rumour from a London colleague; at the time she had dismissed it as ill-informed jealousy. Now she looked around the well-appointed examination room with a new consciousness of what lay behind the tasteful fittings. It was no doubt a rather profitable business; she had budgeted one hundred pounds for the operation, more than a twentieth of her yearly income. Once upon a time she would have guessed that David would have considered such a sideline beneath him.

"I wouldn't, actually," she said. "But then I'm a country GP."

And had spent a good portion of the past decade refusing to desperate women what she now asked for herself. He must be perfectly aware of the fact. She could not quite read his expression; she never had been able to.

"Naturally the fee would be waived. Professional courtesy."

"I hadn't thought of asking," said Hilary. She made a mental note to send the cheque by post.

He asked her to lie on the table and performed a brief examination, his manner faultlessly impersonal, touching her no more than necessary. Hilary, who never had loved him, remembered how, once upon a time, his hands had felt on her body.

"Five weeks, you said?" he asked as she sat up once again. "Perhaps a little early."

Hilary pulled the gown across her legs. "I didn't know how long it would be before I could book an appointment."

"Very wise," said David. "A fortnight, then? If you're able to come up to London again?"

"I'll make the time."

He recorded the appointment in a diary from his desk drawer. She wondered what he was writing, whether "Hilary," "Dr Mansell," "Mrs Fleming," or something else.

"Thank you, David," she said, and hated having to say it.

She reminded herself that she had done exactly what she had set out to do, with a minimum of fuss and emotional display. She had behaved rationally in front of David; she had not embarrassed or humiliated herself, not any more than her situation made strictly necessary. She need not see him for a fortnight - and after that, if she wished, never again.

She wished that he had not been so kind to her. His disdain she could have resisted, kicked against; not so his understanding. She could only be, once again, its unwilling recipient.

Hilary assumed that David would see himself out. Instead, after standing up, he lingered by the door, straightening his tie.

"In the mean time, would you come for a drink with me tonight? For old times' sake."

"Perhaps better not," said Hilary.

He did not look in the least put out at this brief refusal. Very much the David of old, he merely nodded. 

"If you change your mind, you'll find me at the Savoy at eight."

***

"This makes no difference to you at all, does it?" asked Hilary, marvelling.

"Why should it?" said David, taking a sip of his martini. "I respect you; I imagine you have your reasons. Though I won't deny a certain curiosity." 

"I'm too old," said Hilary flatly. "It's nothing to do with my marriage."

David inclined his head towards her, as if provisionally granting the point. Hilary looked away, took a calming drag on her cigarette. She held it to her lips a moment longer than necessary as she began to exhale, making certain that her hand was steady. It was.

The bar at the Savoy was thronged with people, all of them counterfeiting a gaiety that no one really felt in the weary postwar days of 1945. So thought Hilary, or perhaps she was projecting her own feelings onto the crowd. The place was full of American servicemen and they seemed gay enough to make up for the whole of war-weary England.

David had claimed a small table a little out of the main thoroughfare, where they could sit and talk undisturbed. Hilary sat, drinking her gin and tonic, wondering at how natural it felt to be here with him. Perhaps she ought not to have come; she did not feel it now.

"What I should really like to know," said David, "is what you've done with yourself over the past decade. Sanderson always thought that you would set the world on fire."

"He never said that," objected Hilary.

"He did to me."

There was a long silence. 

"There's not so much to tell," said Hilary finally. "I've been in Gloucestershire for... eight years now. Since I left the JR. Quite a decent practice these days; I've been thinking of taking on an assistant. I should certainly have to, if I..."

David ignored the allusion. "A bit of peace and quiet. I could envy you."

Hilary found herself unaccountably laughing. "I don't believe that for a moment."

"No," he admitted. "But a man does dream from time to time."

He looked at her. For a moment Hilary wondered whether he had meant something completely different and then dismissed the thought as foolishness.

"Another drink?" asked David. "Or dinner?"

The mere thought of the latter elicited from her an involuntary face of disgust. She had been feeling faintly queasy for days, though whether through suggestion or actual physiological effect she was not sure. Even a meal at the Savoy was not enough to prove a temptation.

"Another drink, then," he said, and signalled the waiter without pausing to hear her answer.

After that they veered off into areas less immediately fraught. David knew how to tell a story; he always had. He began with reminiscences of their hospital days, full of the follies of youth, and only slightly charged with the knowledge of what they had been to one another then. His stories continued after Hilary had left the hospital; she listened with unfeigned interest, her chin resting on her knuckles, to the various fates of their friends. She remembered her own follies; she found herself laughing; their senses of humour had always happily coincided.

Hilary wondered very briefly, somewhere towards the bottom of her second drink, why she had ever considered herself so lucky to be rid of him. Then it came back to her. She put her glass carefully down on the bar, sliding it a little way from the edge so as to be safe.

"You knew how much I wanted that post, didn't you."

She was interrupting an account of the misadventures of a young house physician whom Hilary was certain had been appointed after she had left. Her voice sounded louder to her than she had meant it to be. It occurred to her that she was perhaps slightly drunk.

"Which post?"

David's unfeigned moment of confusion could not have been more infuriating if it had been intentional.

"Second assistant," she said carefully, "to Ossian Bradford."

"It did become obvious to me eventually, yes."

Hilary gave him a long, hard look. "It should have been obvious to you from the start," she said, forgetting how carefully she had concealed the fact from him.

"It was hardly an unexpected development; we would have been competing for the same posts sooner or later. But it's not as if I could have turned it down once it was offered, however I felt about it."

"Sanderson as good as promised the post to me."

"It wasn't in his gift, Hilary."

"You told Bradford I didn't want it."

David did not shrug. There was merely a slight relaxing of his shoulders, a turn of one hand outwards where it lay on the table near hers. He ignored her small fit of temper as unfit for polite notice.

"It was such a long time ago, Hilary. If he asked, I probably said you had never mentioned it to me - which, even you must agree, was true. Besides that, when you think about it rationally, you must see that if we'd eventually married...."

Her face was burning. "You know very well that would never have happened."

"I know nothing of the sort," he said, watching her with faint amusement, as though he were congratulating himself at having achieved the desired reaction.

In that moment she would have given up the presidency of the Royal College of Surgeons for the chance of throwing a full glass of cold water in his face. But she had just finished her drink, and it had been a lukewarm gin and tonic. With difficulty she controlled herself, for throwing the dregs would have had an anticlimactic, bathetic quality.

"I wouldn't have married you," she said. "So the question never would have arisen."

There was a brief silence.

"He must be a remarkable man, then," said David slowly. "To be able to seduce Dr. Hilary Mansell into giving up all her surgical ambitions."

It should have been her victory. But she knew how David reckoned his victories. She was furious; he was calm, fascinated, clinical. And he - inescapably, horrifyingly - was the only man who had anything to do with her abandoned surgical career. She thought he knew it too.

"Excuse me for a moment," she said, getting up from her chair.

David stood at the same time she did - an unusual gesture from him, something he had never done in the relaxed atmosphere of the housemen's common room. He stood with his hand on the back of the chair, watching her go.

Hilary came very close to walking straight through the foyer and out into the street, stepping into a taxi and not looking back. Instead she found herself standing in the elegant, tiled, echoing Ladies' cloakroom, clenching her fists at her sides and regretting the inconveniently sleek dress that she had bought for the occasion. Being without pockets left her sadly at a loss and, despite her fury, she felt a tinge of amusement at the fact.

A woman swept past her, weighted down with diamonds and furs. Hilary wondered that such people still existed in the world. Feeling conspicuous standing in the middle of the room, she went to one of the mirrors and took the compact from her handbag. She held the sponge in her hand and scrutinised her face, attempting to see herself as David must see her. The fine lines around her mouth, the lipstick - a precious remnant borrowed from Lisa - just a shade too dark for the pallor of her skin.

Was Julian so remarkable, she wondered? Or had he merely provided her with yet another excuse?

For the moment she had forgot her pregnancy. The fact came back to her suddenly, on a wave of nausea that could equally have been cause or consequence. She reeled as though someone had slapped her. In the mirror, even in the gracious dimness of the cloakroom, she could see tiny beads of sweat standing out on her forehead.

She made it to a stall only just in time. The grim process of being sick gave her ample time to ponder the absurdities of human existence. Any insight that she might have reached seemed to swirl away with the remnants of the two cocktails. She stood, steadying herself against the wall, and started to laugh. 

_Hormones_ , she thought. _Hormones, that's all it is. One can't expect to think clearly._

As she left the cloakroom the woman in furs gave her an odd look.

David was waiting at the table where she had left him. Hilary wondered why on earth she had come back, but she could hardly leave again now. He stood to pull out her chair; as she sat, she noticed that her empty glass had been replaced by a teacup and, at her elbow, a teapot. The scent of peppermint rose up to meet her. It was just the right choice for a woman in early pregnancy, as David was no doubt aware; even this fact brought its own small flare of resentment.

Hilary cast about for something neutral to say. "Tell me about your family."

Immediately after she spoke she realised that this was not neutral at all.

"Four children so far. The eldest is seven. We've put him down for Rugby."

Hilary nodded with only half-feigned interest, pouring herself a cup of tea. A quick calculation - if the boy was seven, he had been born barely a year after she had left the Radcliffe. Could that possibly be right? She supposed it must be. How odd that he had produced a large - and presumably growing? - family, after all the care that she and he had exercised to avoid this very possibility.

 _He's probably thinking the same about you_ , she thought.

"I imagine they'll be expecting you home soon."

She held the cup up to her lips but the tea, tantalisingly, was still too hot to drink. Instead she lit another cigarette.

"Not tonight." Once again David sounded amused. "The family live just outside Guildford; it seemed sensible, what with the raids and the odd hours of a surgeon. For me it's London in the week - I've a small place in Westminster, near to Guy's - and the country at the week end."

Hilary suspected that David found the arrangement convenient for a whole host of reasons, then wondered whether she might be doing him an injustice.

"And how does your wife find it?"

One supposed there was a wife, though he had not yet mentioned her.

"Oh, she quite understands. She was a nurse when we met. You might remember her, come to that; Jenny Anderson, she was in orthopaedics."

Hilary had been nodding slowly; then, unaccountably, she burnt her mouth on the tea after all.

"I don't think so," she said, once the reaction had subsided. "I didn't often make it into orthopaedics."

"No, I don't suppose you did." He paused. "You would understand the life of a surgeon better, of course."

She put down the teacup a little too hard. "David," she said chidingly. "That's perfectly awful. Couldn't you have come up with something less obvious?"

"Apparently not. I seem to be out of practice."

"Are you now," she said flatly.

"Yes, I am. As it happens."

His expression of injured innocence looked as though it had not had an airing in a long while; he could have taken lessons from Julian. _Perhaps he's telling the truth_ , thought Hilary, not that she believed it mattered.

"Poor dear." 

David ignored this, as it deserved. "In the interests of full disclosure," he said. "I've taken a room upstairs. I don't see the point of concealment; I imagine you suspected it anyway."

Hilary leaned forward and spoke in an undertone: "I'm not going to sleep with you, David."

He steepled his fingers, a characteristic gesture, tapping his index fingers against his upper lip. Once upon a time it would have moved her to kiss him.

"Why not?" he said, as though nothing could be more natural.

Hilary did not take the bait. "Do you take advantage of all your patients, or just me?"

It occurred to her that she had just this afternoon asked him to perform an illegal operation for which he could well be prosecuted and struck off the register. Perhaps, when it came to medical ethics, she ought not to be throwing stones.

"And when did you stop beating your wife, David?"

"Under the circumstances it seems a fair question. You can hardly seriously..."

"But I do."

He delivered these three words with distinct sincerity; it was a mode of speech of which he was occasionally capable. 

Even a decade earlier, David had been a man who expected to get what he wanted. He had given her fair notice; the rest was up to her.

Hilary sat thoughtfully drinking her tea. Across the table David was giving a perfectly convincing dissimulation of being absorbed in the cigarette he was smoking. He had never expected conversation from her when she felt disinclined to talk; it was, she remembered, one of the things that she had always liked about him. 

In the background a dance band played on. They were, Hilary had the impression, meant to be rather good but it was not her sort of music and the name was not one that she recognised. The place was filling up now, beyond the dinner hour and into the long territory beyond. There were screams of laughter, the flat intonation of American voices, every other table filled with Air Force blue and the drab of khaki. _When can they be going home?_ she wondered idly, caring not at all about the answer.

No one would have spared a glance for the distinctly middle-aged couple sitting together in silence at a corner table. The flicker of David's attention under his heavy eyebrows was something that only Hilary could have sensed.

Another twist of nausea, as though a deity thought her in need of reminding of this essential fact of life, the inescapability of nature.

She hated him, she thought, watching David carefully stub out his cigarette. She hated all men. She hated Julian most of all, and this thought came to her as both revelation and relief, for it was an emotion that she had not previously allowed herself to feel.

"Why not?" she said, an unconscious echo of his own words minutes before. "After all."

"Pardon?"

It would have been worth saying merely for the pleasure of seeing David wrong-footed for once. She felt a cool condescension bubble up inside her, and it pleased her as nothing had done for a long while.

"My dear," she said, "if you want to see me upstairs you'll have to tell me the room number."

He replied as though by autonomic response. "Three-oh-five." 

"I'll follow you," she suggested.

David rose to his feet. He looked down at her for a moment, as though she were a laboratory specimen that had not quite performed according to his expectations. With a slight nod of the head, he took his leave, faultlessly composed once again, making no gesture that might draw the slightest attention or inquiry.

Hilary sat at the table alone, wanting both to laugh and cry. She could feel a pounding in her head; it seemed very slightly distant from the rest of her. Carefully she counted to ten, for no reason that she could determine. Then she lit a cigarette and poured herself more tea. It was only when the cigarette was half smoked that she realised that she had neither checked her watch nor developed any clear idea of how long she intended to keep David waiting.

 _Forever_ , she thought bitterly; the emotion deepened into heartburn as she realised that she had no intention of leaving.

In the lift her head was whirling. It seemed very close, bringing back all her claustrophobia in a rush. She stood staring at a knot in the wood panelling, hardly knowing what she was doing. The lift boy stood discreetly with his back to her, eyes on the sliding grille, but she imputed to his silent presence all of the judgment that she meant to heap upon herself.

_But Julian... I must be quite mad. What would he think? What am I thinking? And with David?_

She took a shaky breath.

Very clearly, and more than once, she had told Julian that she would understand if he took lovers during their wartime separation. It was nothing more than realism; David would have approved. She had taken pains to be certain Julian realised that she meant it, but he had denied with equal emphasis and greater urgency any intention of taking advantage of the understanding that she offered. His only concession had been to say that, of course, if that was how she felt about it, the same freedom should apply to her.

She knew very well that he had only said it out of a sense of fair play, because he felt he owed it her. Love was the only motive that Julian knew; as she was well aware, he saw sex as no more than its physical manifestation. He would acknowledge nothing else. He would never understand.

 _It would ruin everything_ , she thought. And then, with a devastating clarity that she would rather not have consciously attained: _Perhaps that's exactly what I want._

The realisation profited her little. The lift had arrived on the third floor. Her head was spinning badly enough that making her way down the hall to the door took all her attention. There was grey at the edges of her vision, as though a curtain were already beginning to fall.

David answered the door matter-of-factly. No one was passing; the fact seemed important. She steadied herself against the frame of the door.

"You don't look well," he said. "Come in. You should lie down."

"You're going from bad to worse, my dear," replied Hilary vaguely. "Someone should have taught you by now how to seduce a woman."

"Hilary," said David, "you're impossible. You're also not well. Lie down."

Dimly she was aware of a well-appointed suite and a rather grand bed on which she laid herself without peeling back the coverlet. David hovered for a moment - Hilary began to shake her head, wondering whether he might consider himself immediately entitled to take what he had been promised - and then he withdrew. A little while later, when her vision had begun to clear, she raised her head from the pillow and saw that he was sitting across the room in an armchair, calmly reading the Evening Standard. The scene reminded her oddly of their rare evenings together at the JR; usually, of course, she had been studying.

"I rather feel I'm taking advantage of your hospitality," she said finally.

"Mutual advantage was always the intention, wasn't it? But we have all night for that. I'll take your pulse as well if you promise not to consider it prelude to assault."

"I'm capable of taking my own pulse," said Hilary. She sat up and demonstratively did so, finding it slightly thready but adequate.

David had got to his feet despite her protest. He approached the bed now with an expression that suggested impending examination. Once upon a time they had practiced their diagnostic skills upon one another; more than once their practice had turned to something approaching play, of a sort they would have died rather than admit to anyone else. It had always ended in laughter and amity. But that had been a long time ago.

"If you want to make yourself useful," said Hilary, "go away and get me a glass of water."

He sat down on the edge of the bed, ignoring her request.

"Things would be extraordinarily simple, Hilary, if you didn't always insist upon making them complicated."

What an image it conjured up. For David life had been extraordinarily simple; Hilary was sure of that. He had strolled from school to university to hospital with the easy, unhurried stride of a man for whom the feast has been laid long in advance. No obstacles had presented themselves; he had no reason to anticipate them in the future. It was the secret to his success.

And his lack of imagination came from precisely the same source.

"David," she began, "you know I can't sleep with you."

It pained her to say this. She had always prided herself on her decisiveness, upon knowing her own mind. When she said she would do a thing, she did it; she was no tease. But she saw now that it was impossible, and there was no point in drawing out his hopes any longer.

"I never expected that you would," said David. "I was only waiting for you to realise it."

"Really," protested Hilary, "am I that transparent?"

He shrugged. "You have the rest of the night to prove me wrong."

Once upon a time the appeal to her competitiveness would almost certainly have worked. It was so like David that she could not help laughing. "You haven't changed, have you?"

"Neither have you," said David quietly. A long pause. "Are you going to tell me about him?"

Hilary looked away. She wondered at this quiet, luxurious room, so equally distant from the grittiness of London's bombed-out streets and the rusticities of Gloucestershire. This was David's world now; he took it for granted, as he took everything else in his life - except, apparently, her. She hardly thought that he would understand Julian, whom she scarcely understood herself.

"I've told you. He's in the RAF, in India..."

"And you're married?"

"My dear David, _yes_ , we're married. Shall I show you a picture?"

She took the photograph from an inner pocket of her handbag. It had been taken in 1939, just after Julian had been called up; in uniform he had looked impossibly beautiful and impossibly young, flattered by soft studio lighting of which he had no need. She had only persuaded him to sit for a portrait with the inducement that, if he did, she would do the same. Before that she had had only the snapshot of the fifteen-year-old Julian as Prince Hal in his school play; it had perhaps been equally obvious to Julian that this, though charming in its way, was not an adequate keepsake in wartime.

David studied the portrait with disbelieving care; Hilary glanced sidelong at it, to be sure that she had not handed him the fifth-form picture by mistake.

"And when was this taken?" he asked finally.

"Six years ago," said Hilary. "We've been married for six years."

She passed him a second portrait, this of the two of them together. The photographer had asked them both to look at the camera; the only one that had come out well was the one where Julian was gazing directly at her. She had lifted her hand, perhaps about to say something; Julian had taken it up in the moment and held it pressed to his cheek.

"He's thirty-one," she added, answering the unasked question. "Twenty-five then."

"I suppose I needn't ask what the appeal was."

She was surprised at the trace of bitterness in his voice, for David's aquiline looks had been considered - by the standards of the John Radcliffe at least - rather enviable.

"Love," said Hilary simply. "I wouldn't expect you to understand."

 _I used to be nicer than this_ , she thought in amazement. She did not recall that, only half an hour before, she had told herself that she hated, not only David, but Julian also.

"True," David replied. "I never anticipated that you would define love the way other women do. There must be something biological in it after all."

If it were simply a matter of natural instincts, thought Hilary, she would have slapped him by now. Or gone to bed with him. Or both, in either order. 

But she was a modern woman, after all, and refused to be ruled by her biology.

"I should be going now," she said, getting to her feet.

David stood as well. For a moment she thought that he might reach out to her but instead he put his hands in his pockets, a familiar gesture that Hilary had echoed many times.

"I would see you to the taxi, but it's probably better not. It could be misinterpreted." He smiled wryly. "And I'll see you in a fortnight, then?"

In this final sentence he had unconsciously reverted to the crisp, impersonal intonations of a doctor, as if the utterance could return them both to the circles to which they now belonged.

"Yes," said Hilary. "You will. Of course you will."

**Author's Note:**

> Lesley Hall's website was a very useful resource: [Literary Abortion](http://www.lesleyahall.net/abortion.htm)
> 
> And thank you to Makioka for beta reading.


End file.
